Financial institutions have established various processes related to the exchange of documents evidencing monetary transactions. Such documents have historically been encoded with magnetic ink so that information from the documents can be read by machine. Such documents have thus become known as magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) documents. The MICR information is sometimes called the MICR “codeline” since it appears in a line across the bottom of a check. Check processing and sorting systems have also been developed in which a check or similar MICR document has its image captured and stored electronically. Such an image can be archived so that it is indexed with its accompanying data from the MICR read.
In high-speed check processing, errors occur where the image captured for a check is stored and indexed with MICR information for a different account. Typically, such an error occurs due to either a “piggyback” where half of one check overlays another in a sorting and/or imaging system, or an image that was not properly recovered while clearing a jam, thus causing the images and MICR codeline data being processed to lose synchronization. Modern banks typically provide on-line banking systems to customers so that customers can retrieve stored images of their checks. If an image is indexed with incorrect account information, it can be retrieved by the incorrect customer, resulting in a privacy breach.
To detect these defects and prevent such privacy breaches, commercially available image quality assurance software employs technology which compares the magnetically captured MICR data with data obtained from an optical recognition of the printed digits in the image to ensure the data from the two sources is the same. If the data does not appear to be an exact match, the problem is referred to a human operator to determine if there is a problem such that the customer should be kept from viewing the image. The operator then either marks the image appropriately in the bank's own archive, or notifies the bank's archive service provider of the problem so that the image can be appropriately designated.